Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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The single most effective thing you can do for climate change, by far, is vote. The climate is one of those tragedy-of-the-commons problems that can only be solved when everybody consents to work on it together. It takes only a relatively small proportion to prevent any progress from being made.

We certainly to have enough resources to intervene, but doing "something -- no matter how trivial" fails to minimize the destruction. Trivial solutions produce trivial results. Or worse, since they often suffer from unexpected interactions from uncoordinated interventions, and delay actual progress.

We have to work together. Voting is the means by which we decide what action we will take collectively. If you live in the US, you're presented with a fairly straightforward choice on the environment. If that is your top priority, then vote that way, and encourage others to do so as well. If you're setting other priorities ahead of the environment, then that's your right, but the environment will be one of the (many) consequences.

I agree that voting (for the party that accepts climate change) is a helpful step that US citizens can take. But why prove my point by seeking to tear my idea apart? We need more action, not less. Isn't voting and picking up trash in a park better than just voting? Isn't voting, picking up trash in a park, and reducing meat consumption even better?

Yes. But picking up trash in a park, reducing meat consumption, and not voting, is much worse. And that's a point a lot of people appear to be missing, so I felt it was worth pointing out.

Voting is great, but it’s not enough to punch a ballot every few years. We need to be exerting a sustained pressure on our local and national representatives to support and pass legislation. We need to put public pressure on corporations to make changes. Look at how the BLM movement has gotten companies to commit to making changes. We need citizen leaders to provide vision and hope.

I don't know where you live, but on my ballot, "the environment" isn't listed.

Instead of goals or policies, what's listed are politicians.

An honest question: The west coast is represented by Democrats. Who am I supposed to vote for? We've known about climate change, and we've voted. We've had both Republican and Democratic regimes over the past half century, but what has changed for the better? Just recently, House Democrats voted to give 850,000 acres of a Nevada wildlife refuge to the airforce for bombing [0].

This makes me think you cannot vote your way out of climate disasters. Telling people to vote doesn't really solve the problem. What are concrete steps that can be done?

If voting is the only thing we can do, then I think we're in big trouble.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/DROPTHEMIC2020/status/13062362926...

We are in big trouble. I'll be blunt that even the best conceivable case is very bad.

As you say, we've had both "regimes", but never for very long, especially given that it takes an overwhelming effort to accomplish anything legislatively. A party in favor of the status quo can stop all change if it runs either house of the legislative or the executive branch -- and it needs only a 41 vote minority in the Senate.

The only way for change to happen is to vote for it over and over, consistently. The party that comes closer to your view on the environment has won two elections in a row exactly once in my lifetime. Even after they get into power they have to actually govern a large, fractious country, including genuine differences of opinion within themselves.

So you can make a perfectly consistent case for giving the fuck up as impossible. Even if your party wins in November, I can practically guarantee that they'll lose two years from now. I stresssed voting in the gp post because you need to do it every goddamned time if you want anything to change. I do think it is the only thing we can do, and yeah, we're in big trouble.

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